Who writes this, and why

The short version

I am not a psychologist. I have no clinical training and no letters after my name. What I have is a list of things that had me and no longer do: coffee, smoking, alcohol, the phone that used to eat my evenings, and a couple I will keep to myself.

Not one of those came off through willpower. I tried willpower for years. Willpower is a fight you have to keep winning, and you only have to lose once.

What actually worked

Two things, and they fit together.

The first was a method that goes after the wanting instead of the doing. Rather than white-knuckling past a craving, you take apart the belief underneath it until the thing stops looking like a reward and starts looking like what it is. Once that lands, there is nothing left to resist. You are not giving something up. You are putting down something that was never paying you.

The second was the identity shift James Clear describes in Atomic Habits. You do not quit smoking by refusing cigarettes. You quit by becoming someone who does not smoke, and then behaving accordingly. The behaviour follows the identity, not the reverse.

Why procrastination

Somewhere around the fourth habit I noticed I was running the same loop on my own work. Something uncomfortable comes up, I reach for relief, relief arrives, and the discomfort comes back slightly worse. That is the shape of an addiction, and procrastination fits it exactly. The substance is just avoidance.

So I turned the same method on it. That is what Procrastitype is: the approach that got me off five things, applied to the one that does not look like an addiction because everybody has it.

What this is not

None of it is therapy, and none of it is a diagnosis. The assessment is a self-report questionnaire rather than a clinical instrument, and it has not been externally validated. If your procrastination is tangled up with depression, anxiety or ADHD, a professional will help you in ways a quiz cannot.

Where the writing leans on research, the research is named on the page and listed in full on the research page. Ferrari, Chu and Choi, Steel, Sirois and Pychyl did the science. I applied it. Those are different jobs and I try not to blur them.

Elsewhere: jnorthwood.com